Freeway Hit Machine

What’s the secret to making money on the web? If you ask some arbitrary business-type, chances are they’ll start frothing at the mouth, do a little bobble-head dance while their eyes roll back into their head and they squeal: “Traffic, traffic, traffic!”

It’s easy to get caught up in this mentality. Of course! If people see my product there is a 10-40% chance that they’ll download it. If they download it, there is a 1-4% chance that they’ll buy it. This all adds up to … between 1 and 16 sales per 1000 visitors. Obviously, the only thing to do is increase visitors.

But that’s only looking at one side of the equation. There seems to be an obsession on increasing the quantity of visitors instead of improving the quality. I’m guilty of it, too. Maybe it’s because we have better tools at our disposal for measuring sheer numbers.

Of course I get excited when a mention on some popular blog or in a news publication sends a bunch of visitors my way. They show up on Mint, and it makes me feel popular. So I pat myself on the back and keep working. I have also enjoyed watching my Technorati rank slowly increase. It’s something. A metric that tells me I’m doing something useful and should continue. But when hundreds of 5-second readers surge in from Digg or some other general-tech news source, is it really doing anything for my blog or my business? At least the Technorati ranking has the secondary effect of improving my appearance in niche categories. So getting a lot of traffic from whatever source can help inflate my numbers and increase the odds that somebody actually looking for what I’m writing about will see it and be encouraged to come visit. But what does Digg do for me?

I suppose it’s easy to argue that more eyeballs is always a good thing. After all, some goofball who couldn’t care less about Macs or software development might nonetheless recognize my name when sitting in a meeting where a committee is trying to decide whether to give me thousands of dollars. What? It could happen!

But in general, the dialogue of my blog and the sales of my software are directly related to the quality of my visitors. So it’s a lot better if Merlin Mann notices and points to my app than if it gets mentioned in some Windows-user forum as something they’d “like to see” on the PC. What am I going to say to bunch of PC users? I’d rather open a coffee-shop or write music than develop for your platform? Lo siento. No hablo PC, Señor.

Digg is like an international tech freeway. Lots of people are traveling on it, passing through thousands of sites per day. Maybe they snap a few pictures as they speed by at 85 MPH, but they rarely stop to truly take in the surroundings.

There’s a reason the freeways always pass through poor sections of town. Nobody really wants to be on or near them. They’re a means to an end. We use them when we need a change of scenery – whether we’re wandering or speeding through the night towards a known destination. In any case, we’re not in the mood to buy anything meaningful on the freeway. Nobody is. We might pay for a Coke from the rest area snack machine, or be seduced by a Taco Bell billboard, where we’ll stop for 15 minutes to part with at most $5 of our hard-earned cash. The freeway is a trashy marketplace.

When a freeway plan intrudes on a thriving city marketplace, the shopkeepers get furious. They know the freeway spells the death of their neighborhood, and therefore the death of their business. But on the Internet most of are convinced that a freeway running through our neighborhood is a good thing, and I think we’re wrong about that. Dead wrong.

And yes, I see the irony of this post having just below it a “Digg This” icon. What can I say? I still like to be dugg. But it feeds my ego much more than my blog or business.